User:Jxl1734/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Culture of Cuba: Culture of Cuba

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Because I plan on focusing on Cuba for my semester project, a basic level of understanding about their culture seems to be in order. At first glance, it seems to be decently thorough, but definitely not all-encompassing. Additional sources should always be used, but here, they would be definitely needed. There is a lot of hyperlinks to other articles present, which I like, as it makes it easy to find relevant or deeper information.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Lead: This article's lead is short and to the point, but really offers no more detail than the title. It does not give an idea of what's the come.

Content: The article does hit what most would consider to be the defining aspects of culture, but the information given does not always seem to be adequate. For example, the cuisine section lists seemingly random facts about crop production, but only has one or two sentences about what most would consider important to the topic of cuisine: What are main ingredients? Spices? Popular dishes? Deserts? It just seems under-researched, especially for a country with such a vast selection. Then, under people and dance, the author mentions someone named "Fairley" with no context or even a full name. Lack of context or thorough information to connect pieces of information is lacking throughout.

Tone: The article seems to be written from a neutral point of view, though I can tell from the "talk" page that that was not always the case. It is decently written, but seems to be missing any kind of transition between topics. It reads more of a random collection of facts than a well thought out article.

Sources: As mentioned above, there are tons of hyperlinks throughout, which, as a reader, I do appreciate. As far as I can tell, all of the links work. When looking at his list of sources, I notice lots of books, which is great, but I also notice a few that seem like first-hand accounts. These are always useful in contextualizing things, but I am not sure we can apply one person's account to the country's culture as a whole. Also, a majority of the sources are in Spanish. That is to be expected when discussing Cuba, but I do wonder how accurate the author's translations are.

Images: The page has five photos in total, but are all laid off to the right side in a way that I can read through the piece almost without noticing them. Captions do not give any new or additional information, so it seems photos were just thrown in with little thought as to why.

Talk Page: The talk page is a bit of a mess. There are flags for plagiarism, incorrect or missing information and faulty links. It is rated C-Class and of high importance, and is is part of WikiProjects, which I assume explains the chaos that is the "Talk" page.

Overall: The article does a decent job of providing very surface level information, but it simply does not have enough for it to be considered an all-encompassing explanation of the long, rich history of Cuba and its culture. It needs to be longer and more thorough, as I really do not feel like I took away much new information.